User blog:Friendlysociopath/A Few Differences
A vague title for a vague premise, this is just a blog where I'll be throwing a few tidbits of wisdom/bullshit around. Read at your own risk. I'll do my best to include links for anything and everything I want. Nukes vs Bullets Tanking a nuke is a good feat- shows quite the superhuman resistance to radiation, heat, and even that giant wave of force. But, (of course there's a but) know what that doesn't mean? Bullets won't hurt you. That's right,' tanking a nuke in no way means bullets aren't effective'. And that is why I constantly go on to various people (Namely Des, a lot of it was chatting with Des) that these attack potency things aren't always relevant. Because it's a matter of pressure. These two articles may be useful to understanding this . Now, notice something about the numbers on the goverment link? As little as a 20 psi change can kill a normal human for almost certain. If you read further it will talk about shrapnel and whatnot, which is actually a bit more important than the actual "bang ". Obviously a nuke will put out more than 20 psi from a change mind you, but I just wanted to give you a small example of what is required to knock over a building - nukes sometimes can hit 50psi . But if 20 psi can destroy a building, how much psi can a gun possibly put out ? Funny you should ask, over 34,000 . Now, obviously bullets do not tear down buildings- but I'm not talking about buildings am I? I'm talking about people (this applies to swords as well btw). The smaller the area you can focus the force, the better the pressure will be. The more pressure you output, the better you can pierce something. This is why Link vs Cloud narrowed down to that PSI calc for the Golden Gauntlets. Link can tank 61,000 psi on the area the Golden Gauntlets cover- Link's gauntlets- and possibly his entire body- are bulletproof for most weapons. Even a 50cal only outputs about 55,000 psi This is also why whenever someone indicates a character is "City-block level" I ask whether that was from a bullet, blade, fist, or just an explosion. These are incredibly different pressures. Now, do not confuse catching or blocking with outright tanking the bullets; tanking the bullets is a bit more rare in fiction than the former two. Some of you have asked me about a needle affecting Goku? That would be pressure, imagine the size of a bullet- imagine the size of the head of a needle. Precognition in Battle Precognition, the ability to know something will happen before it does. However, something else that must be kept in mind is the combat speed the person with precog is capable of. Let's take a well-known example, Spider-Man . His precog allows him to sense incoming attacks almost before they happen- does this mean he can dodge any attack? No, he can dodge the fastest attack he has dodged with precog (Which happens to be lightspeed attacks ). But what happens when someone can consistantly fight at those speeds? I don't mean firing lasers with a humans limit on aiming and pulling the trigger, I mean someone who actually punches and moves at relativistic speeds. Spider-Man may be able to predict the attacks coming, but if he cannot move quickly enough to respond to multiple attacks at those speeds, his precog will be overwhelmed because he can't keep up. Spider-Man cannot move at those speeds. Most of the time he's running around and fighting at supersonic to hypersonic speeds; his reaction speed is higher than his combat speed because of his precog. An extreme example: Imagine you had half a second precog in combat, now try to think what that would do against the Flash- by the time you've moved to deal with the first hit- a dozen more could land on you. Obviously a massively overbearing example, but it makes the point come across fairly well, you need speed to back up your precog. Precog alone is not enough. This is why the combat speed of the precog person matters, if you aren't fast enough then that precog won't prevent more than the first few attacks. Area of Effect is another story, because you then have to be moving fast enough to get out of the area before it hits. Again, speed is a key thing to consider alongside the precog. Something else to keep in mind is whether the precog has ever failed. Spider-Man's Spider Sense has pretty much always worked unless something deliberately was screwing with it. It doesn't just turn off. But if another character has precognition that leaves them open to being attacked, that allows someone to get the jump on them, that precog must be noted to not be foolproof. If it doesn't always work in the universe it comes from, then it can't be considered to always work in a Deathbattle. How you use this information is obviously up to you, but it is not fair to use precog that can fail as infallible when there are actually infallible precognition powers out there. Bullet-Timing Pistols Shotguns Machineguns In order to be given consideration for a possibly hypersonic designation for dealing with a machinegun, the character has todeflect multiple bullets from the shooter or be evading the bullets while moving through the stream . Outrunning the stream of bullets, or simply running forwards whlie no bullets go anywhere near the character, does not make you hypersonic. Catching the bullets from an automatic weapon will work just as well. But bottom line- you have to be interacting with the bullets. Snipers Combat Speed, Reaction Speed, and Movement Speed I can throw a baseball at you, you may or may not be able to dodge the baseball. This is your reaction speed- how quickly you can react to incoming stimuli. Professional pitchers can throw at as much as 100 mph. Now say you dodged that- what does it mean? It means you could react to the ball coming at you and move in time to avoid it. By gauging the distance the ball flew and how far you moved during a timeframe, you can also sometimes get combat speed out of it. Does that mean you move at 100mph (or 44m/s)? Or can throw a punch at that speed? No- a person can dodge a baseball,that doesn't mean their punches are anywhere near the same speed . Your combat speed is how fast you can strike, defend, and move in combat. It goes alongside reaction speed but it is not the same as reaction speed. It can be equal to, less than, or greater than your reaction speed- although the two should be similar to one another. For example, the written EU version of Grievous vs Obi-Wan shows Grievous' combat speed actually exceeding his reaction speed. Grievous, snarling fury, ramped up the intensity and velocity of his attacks—sixteen per second, eighteen—until finally, at twenty strikes per second, he overloaded Obi-Wan’s defense. So Obi-Wan used his defense to attack. A subtle shift in the angle of a single parry brought Obi-Wan’s blade in contact not with the blade of the oncoming lightsaber, but with the handgrip. For those of you who don't study fencing or bladeplay- Obi-Wan holds his saber a bit lower as Grievous attempts to make a vertical strike on him- and Grievous puts his hand through the space where the blightsaber was. He couldn't stop in time because he was fighting at speeds he couldn't react to. His combat speed was greater than his reaction speed. This is actually more common in fiction than it is in reality , but it does exist in reality as well . Those moments when your fighting exceeds conscious thought and you are moving by instinct or reflex? That is you getting very close to exceeding your reaction speed- if the enemy does something you do not expect you will likely be unable to deal with it. Seriously, if your college has some fencing classes they're a good way to keep in shape and they really help understand bladeplay a lot better, your teachers will also be pretty cool- how could they not be- they get to play with swords all day! This last bit is more trivia than anything else. Movement speed is sometimes referred to as traveling speed. Very often the speeds demonstrated in battles are not the speeds the characters can move over long distances. The explanations vary from it simply being only available in bursts to them lacking the energy to go all-out like that simply for travel. Both explanations have some credit to them as various speedsters like Raiden and Goku simply do not appear to fly at the speeds they're capable of in combat. Movement speed is seldom brought up in matches simply because the two (or more) characters are supposed to be fighting one another, typically in CQC. Unless one makes a habit of running away to keep a range advantage, travel speed won't be a factor. Nothing Category:Blog posts